The Flame Alphabet Read Online Free PDF

picnic in our usual spot, up on Tower Ledge.
    The field was quiet when we arrived, thoroughly childless. Some older couples, wrapped in parkas and camp blankets, huddled around their bread and jam. They suffered from the facial smallness; I tried not to stare. But people with shrunken features seemed short on time. It was like they were on their deathbeds. A ventilator chugged along on a carpet, churning liquid in its tank. Beneath a shawl two women shared the mask, passing it back and forth without bothering to wipe it out between turns.
    As usual, some families had run extension cords up from their cars to power portable heaters, casting shimmering air over the field. You could walk through pockets of heat, as if they had burst through a hole in the earth.
    In the field no one sang, and if there was speech, it was whispered at levels too low to decode. People hummed in secretive tones, giving in to fits of coughing when their breath failed. When Claire and I walked through the grass looking for a dry patch where we might settle, picking our way through collapsed piles of people, we triggered ripples of silence in everyone we passed. No one wished to be overheard.
    But I didn’t want the secrets of these strangers. I did not think I could bear them.
    The picnic tables, usually loaded with serving boats of communal food, were empty except for traces of gauze rolls, some shredded medical supplies. Wrist straps and crumbled yellow tubing sat in the dirt. A fluid had dried and gone dark in streaks over the grass. It looked like the aftermath of an outdoor surgery.
    At the shaded end of the field, where the sand run was installed, no little dogs tore back and forth, kicking up blizzards of sand. No dogs to be seen in the whole field. No dogs and no children.
    Over on the scorched cement pads no one was shooting off rockets into the woods below. The public fire pit hadn’t been cleaned from last time, and last time seemed like long ago. A mound of coals spilled over the rim of the hole, and the spit rod was still filthy with skin, from what might have been the final cookout.
    The field was usually so crowded that family blankets met at their edges until the grass was covered in a great rug of black tufted wool. But today our rugs were scattered far apart, too few to ever connect, and we sat in distant rafts from each other, mostly out of earshot.
    “I guess it’s sort of cold,” I offered, by way of a theory.
    Claire didn’t second me. She must have also known that couldn’t be it. We’d come here in weather far worse and the field was packed with families. In the snow last year we rolled our blanket over frozen grass. Someone built a fire inside an old iron lung, which got so hot it glowed. When the sun set in late afternoon some elders launched from a slingshot hardened balls of birdseed, which ripped through the sky and occasionally got intercepted, in dusty explosions, by the bald sparrows that kept watch in the trees and shot out when they saw food.
    It was not such a nice day and there was illness in the field, but we decided to stay. We’d come all the way out here and both of us dreaded being home again, where the house smelled of our own spoiled traces. Esther was coming back tonight, so at least today, for a little while in the field, we could spend our recovery out of doors with some people who were almost our own.
    The picnics were not strictly for the Jews of our neighborhood and maybe Bayside or Fort Wine, but they’d winnowed down that way. We were a community bound by an agreement to graze in the same field and enjoy the sight of each other, but beyond that it needn’t escalate.
    We used to bring our kids to these picnics as surrogate social agents and the kids seemed to coagulate in some violent, anonymous way, even if the adults cuddled inside their own force fields and only said hello to one another.
    Hello
was the perfect word. It began and ended all contact, delivering us into private chambers from